In the world of graphics cards there a lot of also-rans, cards that
were released but didn't really leave a mark on the industry.
Reference cards are a dime a dozen (not really, though $0.10 HD 7970s
sounds like a great thing to me) and when the only thing vendors can
compete on is price it is very hard to make a compelling argument for
one card over another. The ASUS Matrix Platinum HD 7970 that we are
looking at today in no way suffers from these problems - it is a
custom design with unique features that really give it the ability to
stand out from the clogged quarters of the GPU shelf.